Book review.

Ex-journalist Tells The Tale Of Ad Campaign Gone Awry

February 06, 1995|By Reviewed by Stephanie Goldberg, a Chicago writer.

Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertsing Story

By Randall Rothenberg

Knopf, 496 pages $25

The point of driving a car may be to get from point A to point B, but which vehicle you choose is a personal statement. It's a way of telling the world how much money you have, how daring or practical you are, even the size of your family.

For Madison Avenue and its outposts across America, however, buying a car is an act tantamount to salvation. Advertising agencies expand and contract on the strength of one fat account, and hundreds of hours are spent searching for the perfect combination of pictures and words that will galvanize consumers into action.

Several years ago, the ailing American division of Subaru Motors devoted a vast amount of effort to finding an agency that was supposed to restore its sagging market share. Randall Rothenberg, a former advertising columnist for The New York Times, was there to follow corporate honchos around from the time that Subaru knew it had to fire its old agency until the same fate befell its replacement a short while later.

"Where the Suckers Moon," which borrows its title from an A.J. Liebling quote about flimflam, tells the Suburu story and tells it well. But the book also amounts to a thoughtful and incisive history of advertising. The ad business had been dominated by old-line WASPs, notes Rothenberg, until the early 1960s-when Doyle, Dane & Bernbach's revolutionary ad campaign for Volkswagen opened the door for multi-ethnic agencies. The Volkswagen ads were bright, irreverent and filled with self-mockery: the most famous one challenged car owners to "Think Small." Rothenberg writes: "The Volkswagen campaign, in short, changed the culture of advertising. . . . With the Creative Revolution (as Bernbach's rebellion was called) they were in a new business. These agencies manufactured entertainment."

By the late '80s, however, the Creatives had grown fat and stale. New York City no longer held a monopoly on the nation's ad business, and when Subaru went prospecting for a new agency, only five of the 10 it visited were based there.

Rothenberg plays the story of how the agencies pitched for the Subaru account for the high camp it is. One enterprising Baltimore agency even went to the trouble of stocking its underground parking lot with rented Subarus.

The Subarus (as Rothenberg nicknames his corporate warriors) almost went for a campaign built on the schlemiel appeal of actor Michael Tucker (tax attorney Stuart Markowitz on "L.A. Law"), but in the end chose the insouciance of Portland, Ore.-based Wieden & Kennedy, the agency that put Nike athletic shoes on the map.

Wieden's gimmick for Subaru was supposed to be no gimmick at all-the regular-guy voice of an actor (ultimately, Brian Keith) who would intone about the silliness of car advertising, leaving viewers with the impression that Subaru was somehow above it all. Each commercial ended with the slogan: "Subaru. What to Drive."

While advertising writers loved Wieden's high concept, Subaru's rank-and-file-its regional network of distributors-were considerably less enchanted. Some helpfully faxed in their own versions of print ads. At one time, Wieden might have laughed this off, but the account represented $10 million in billings. There was also the special pressure of proving that the upstarts at Wieden could handle a car account as well as the big guys. In the end, the agency diluted the campaign.

Not that it helped. Subaru's sales remained flat, and after enduring the very public failure of a much ballyhooed launch, the company fired Wieden in short order. If there's a message to "When the Suckers Moon," it may be that despite the volumes of research and elaborate rationalizations, advertising remains essentially an act of faith.